ATV

World Space Week 2011

3 October 2011

Passing on a passion for space

World Space Week: an admirable initiative in which Airbus Defence and Space is an active participant

For the fifth year running, Airbus Defence and Space is participating in World Space Week. Throughout the week hundreds of Airbus Defence and Space employees will be passing on their passion for space and for their work in the space industry to the general public and particularly young people.

World Space Week was launched by the United Nations in 1999. World Space Week is an annual world-wide celebration of ‘science and technology’s role in improving people’s lives’. It takes place annually from 4–10 October, in commemoration of the launch of Sputnik, the first ever artificial satellite, on 4 October 1957, and the entry into force of the International Space Treaty on 10 October 1967.

The purpose of the week, during which numerous events will take place, is to inform the general public about the world of space, the associated technologies and skills, and how it helps life here on Earth.

Airbus Defence and Space will be participating in several events, including fostering local site and employee initiatives in the company’s five ‘home nations’.

For World Space Week 2010, over 300 people from Airbus Defence and Space went out to schools, colleges and institutions to meet 14,500 young people in Germany, France, Spain, the UK, the Netherlands and Greece, to introduce them to space, space technologies, jobs in the space industry and the benefits that space brings to people’s daily lives.

The theme of this year’s World Space Week: ‘50 years of human spaceflight’. Read more ...

Spaceplane – Rocketing into the futureSince 2006, Airbus Defence and Space has been working on a revolutionary new vehicle able to carry four passengers up to an altitude of 100km into space, or to fulfil number of other scientific or operational suborbital missions.

25 years of Spacelab, Europe’s passport to spaceWhen the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) awarded the contract to build a research laboratory for conducting experiments in microgravity to a European consortium in 1973, nobody at the time could have imagined that this heralded a new era of European human spaceflight.